January 18, 2004

Of limes and racial epithets

In
an early Language Log post,
Geoff Nunberg
commented on the D.C. District Court's decision to allow the Washington Redskins
to retain their name, though the Court acknowledged
that redskin is a derogatory, offensive
term for Native Americans. The court's decision seems to rest on the following
premise:

(A)

A word W is inappropriate as a name for a product or corporation
in a speech community C just in case every speech community
within C regards W as offensive on every meaning that
W can have in C.

I
followed-up on Geoff's post with examples strongly suggesting that this
isn't how people use racial epithets. I'd like to offer some new evidence
for my position.

I think (S) is much closer to the relevant convention:

(S)

A word W is inappropriate as a name for a product or corporation
in a speech community C just in case some speech community
within C regards W as offensive on at least one of the
meanings that W can have in C.

My father, Art Potts, found additional support for
generalization (S), in a rather unlikely place: a recent
New York Times article on limes:

The fruit's name, however, remains problematic, because kaffir, originally an Arabic word for unbeliever, is used by whites in South Africa as a derogatory term for blacks. The name kaffir lime derives from Asia rather than South Africa, perhaps from Indian Muslims who encountered the fruit as an import from Thailand and Sri Lanka, where non-Muslims predominated. Nevertheless, the term is offensive to some, and the Thai name, makrut, is sometimes used as a substitute.

So, it seems that there exists a speech community in which the word
kaffir has meanings (uses) on which it is offensive
and meanings (uses) on which it is not offensive. If
generalization (A) were correct, people in this community would not
be shy about using the word in commercial transactions. But the truth, as reported in the article, is that they are shy about using it, just as
generalization (S) predicts.

If people do in fact operate under condition (S), then this should be the
court's guiding principle. The conventions of the relevant speech community are
our only coherent standard for linguistic issues such as this one.